


Child of Heaven and Earth

by fresne



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Hymn to Demeter - Homer
Genre: Being eaten isn't a permanent problem for gods, Dubious Consent, F/M, Furies are furious, Graphic Violence in that Zagreus - a baby - gets partially eaten., Hades is a kidnapper, Misses Clause Challenge, Other than in a ptsd sort of way, Sex while Under the Influence, Sex while under pressure, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:55:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28303434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: It was called a tale as old as time. A beautiful young woman kidnapped by a beast. The ruler of the underworld.Some things to keep in mind. This girl's name was Kore. That name meant girl or maiden. And by the by, Demeter's name meant earth mother, which meant everything about them up to that point could be summed up as mother and daughter.Persephone meant bringer of destruction. That came later.
Relationships: Demeter/Zeus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hades/Persephone (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Hera/Zeus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Persephone/Zeus (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), Semele/Zeus
Comments: 14
Kudos: 47
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	1. Re-birth of the Gods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AceQueenKing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/gifts).



> I loved how each of your requests wove together so many variations of the Greek mythos. Admittedly, the Zagreus here draws from myth and not the video game. Also, hopefully the method of the gods getting out of Kronos is okay. I've focused more on their getting out, and tried to pull in a few things from a number of the prompts.

##  Stone

The rock came out first. It had lodged in Kronos throat for an age. At first Kronos felt relief when the stone flew out of his lips.

That's about it for the story of the rock. 

##  Sea King

Poseidon was re-born second to first. He was the last child of Kronos to be swallowed alive. 

When Poseiden was an infant, he was held firmly in Demeter's arms so he wouldn't fall. As he grew older, he sat on his Demeter's shoulders. The more he grew, the more he pushed up his father's throat. There was no other direction to grow in that cramped space. That and crush his sisters down. 

Poseidon was the first to be thrown from his father's mouth. He flew through the air in a great arc from the heights of Mount Orthys. He was lucky. He fell into the sea. He kicked his legs and no one told him to stop. He spread his arms out wide. He swam up to the surface of the still crashing waves. This was a bit of a mistake, because Helios driving the chariot of the sun across the sky spotted him and the others. Night came quickly on the first day of the war while Helios rushed to tell his father Hyperion what he'd seen. 

Iapetos gathered what sons who would follow him and raced down to the source of the tidal wave tossling sea.

Now in those days Poseiden didn't have the skill to hide the shine of his godhood. In his father's belly, the golden glow of the gods had been their only source of light. Thinking quickly, he lent some of his light to the silvery fish all around him. They all glowed in the water. He swam right up between his uncle's feet while the Titans searched the water.

Epimetheus the Titan of afterthought told his father, "I don't see him." He kicked at the waves lapping over his ankles and lifted the dripping bottom edge of his tunic. "I don't think he's here."

If Prometheus the Titan of forethought had been with them, he could have told them where to look. But Prometheus was elsewhere. 

Poseiden darted around in the water until his uncle and cousins climbed out of the water. He waited until the moon rose in a sliver over the horizon. Although, in those days one of Hyperion's kids, Selene, drove the chariot of the moon, and Artemis was just a lonely longing in her mother's heart. 

He waited until he couldn't wait another moment. How he longed to remain in the sea, but he knew that his brothers and sisters must be waiting for him. That he couldn't remain a fish forever. So he flopped himself onto shore and went to join a war.

This was how grunyions came to glow when they go to spawn on the shore. The actions of the gods leave strange imprints on the world.

##  Queen of the Heavens

Last girl to be swallowed. Next to fall. To fly. Hera flew up rather than down. Lifted by the lightness within her. She perched up in the sky and took the color of the sky into her flesh. Hoping to hide.

But Koios with starlight in his brow chased after her. He shouted, "Stand still so I can put an end to you." 

"No thank you," said Hera. She became a sparrow and swooped in the sky. He became a sparrow hawk and raced after her matching her swoop for swoop. She became a falcon and stooped. He became a great eagle with wide wings that sliced the air. She became a dragonfly that skimmed the surface of a wide lake. He became a trout that almost caught her. Almost. Because she became herself and squashed him under her foot calling out, "Sorry. Sorry." She had just spent decades in a very cramped belly where she was forever apologizing for kicking or elbowing someone.

After that she lost herself in a cloud for a little bit. She knitted stars from her light. A crown of light so she could see better. Hera just wanted to be left alone. To stretch. Not to be pushed down from above. Not to have to sit still for the good of the ones below.

"Kronos won't leave you alone," warned Metis from the top of mount Olympos, "If we are going to create a new world order, a more just world, then we need you."

Behind Metis, a blue eyed youth said, "I'm going to create that world. Full of justice." It was her brother. Zeus. The one who wasn't swallowed. Hera reminded herself it would be wrong to resent him for that. She wasn't petty. She wanted to be kind and full of light. "But I'm not much of a fighter." She knew that already. 

"Of course not," said Zeus. "You've spent your life inside a stomach. Not like me. I've spent all my years training for this." Of course, by training he meant listening to stories and having fun. 

"We'll need more than just fighters," said Metis firmly. Wisely. Kindly. "We need everyone." 

Hera resolved to bind the wounds of her brothers and sisters with star thread. Mother them when the war went badly. Praise them when the battles went well. Make nets to bind their enemies. She wanted very much to be loved and that was her way of wooing love. Giving.

This was where the first stars came from. Hera made each one by hand and from her heart. 

##  Wild as Wheat

Demeter was middle born. Middle swallowed. Demeter fell into a field. She fell into the soft embrace of the earth. Rich and brown, she took its color into her skin. She took the color of spring wheat for her hair. She took the color of the leaves for her eyes. She put her rooting feet deep into the ground. 

Her uncle Hyperion incinerated her with his blaze. 

Demeter let him think he's succeeded. She made herself into a pine cone that sprouts when the fire burns. She grew with the first rain and went to join the war.

It was important to her that she be strong in those days. She threw herself into every battle. The Titans weren't about to give up their power easily. She was as fierce as a wild wood on a moonless night. She was as ruthless as a mountain peak where the snow never melts. She fought with every part of herself.

Demeter shattered her first weapon, an ash spear from the tree of a Meliai, on Atlas' shield. 

He laughed at her. "Little girl, I will shatter your bones. Grind your flesh between my teeth." He snapped his mountainous teeth, and she could almost feel them until Hesta blazed a distraction. 

That battle went poorly. At the dirge, hard to call it a celebration after, Demeter drowned her swimming sorrows. Danced despair by the firelight. Refused to stop when Hestia asked her if she was tired. Demeter was determined to never be tired. 

She begged a sharp tipped rake from a Hekatonkheires. It did better than the spear. It breached Atlas' shield. She shouted, "I will be the one to shatter your bones. To grind your flesh between my teeth." She went a little mad then. Wildly delivering blows. That battle went somewhat better. The gods didn't have to flee in the shapes of birds.

The party after was less of a wake and more of a primordial rite of growing forests and primal howls to the enemy moon. For the sun and moon were enemies of the gods in those days.

As to where just Zeus was with his thunderbolts during these two battles, in theory he was wooing secrets out of the daughters of Koios: the newly made widow Asteria and Leto. In practice, he was fucking around. 

In any case, after the wooing and the battles, Demeter went to Metis and said, "I need a weapon that won't break." 

Zeus' glare made clear what he thought of sharing his lightning weapons, but that wasn't what Demeter wanted. She knew what she needed. "I want the blade of final harvest." Her hand moved as if already holding it. "Please, Metis. Either we have it or he does." Her lips curled as she thought about her father.

Demeter watched Metis grow a plan, but it was very dangerous. Demeter must take the shape of a boy. That was easy. She must go into the metal fortress on Mount Orthys with the young cupbearers. That was not. She must face her father as he sat ripping the hearty haunch of a massive bloody leg with strong white teeth. She must wait while she poured ambrosia into his cup. 

Demeter could be patient. She waited until her father was deep in his cups. She went to the vault of his greatest treasures. Forced the door open with brambles. She took up the blade with its golden glow. She said, "I could go back. I could kill him right now." But she heard the other Titans shambling about in their cups, and knew herself to be alone. She did not return to the great hall. 

Instead, she slaughtered the Titans that blocked her escape out the front door. The blade was very good at slaughter. Wolves and lions grew out of the spilled blood. Wild creatures for a wild world.

This was how the blade came into Demeter's hands. This was how the goddess of nature learned to harvest.

##  A God and His Dog

Haides was the first son of Kronos to be swallowed. He and Hestia were a long time together in the bowels of the beast. For to Haides' mind what was a being that ate its own children but a beast. 

Haides was ejected. He struck the earth and punched through into the abyss below. The shadow that was not the absence of light, but the chthonic gloom that breathed before light. 

This shadow moved in spiky eldritch shards and shifting folds. This was the shade that became a part of him when he fell. That some part of it, the living breathing part, clung and stuck to the acid wounds in his flesh. That sank into him and became his aegis. His protection. 

But this darkness didn't stop him from falling. It merely slowed him so that when he finally reached the farthest place that existed, the force of the blow merely punched a wound in the land that answered a wound in himself. 

From the long hate carefully brewed by his captivity came the inky sludge and poisonous swamp of the river Styx. Liquid that could render a body mute with screaming. Trapped and unable to move. From the black consuming depth of Haides' rage came the Pyriphlegetho n , an eternally burning river.

The dog was there when Haides woke up. A three headed squamous dog with flickering serpents for a mane, a wagging serpent's tail, and lion's claws. Belly gaunt with hunger. Skittish. Feral. Who whined over Haides. Licked at his face until he woke up. Haides miracled three meaty bones for that gaunt hound. The first meal Kerberos had ever eaten. 

Moments after his second birth, the Titans found him. Krios sneered at Haides. "Boy, you are a fugly looker." He raised his mighty club.

His son, Perses, the Titan of destruction, laughed in anticipation. "Club the fugly out of him, dad." 

"S'what I plan to do, son." Krios laugh echoed through the wide still land.

Haides gathered his darkness, but slowly. Kerberos was not slow. Kerberos leapt up and snatched the club from air. Snapped it in three sets of mighty growling jaws giving the gift of time. 

Haides pushed himself to his feet. Gathered his darkness. Krios was no Hyperion to shine brightly enough to pierce that shade. 

Krios escaped the snapping darkness and the slashing claws. Perses did not, and so left his wife, Asteria, a widow. Not that she grieved much over him. 

Really, all that needed to be said of Perses was that his only child, Hekate, the Titan of choices and magic, heard what had happened and walked down into Tartaros with a torch in each hand. She walked through the hole in the triple darkness left by Haides' fall until she came to where Haides still sat weary combing the burs from Kerberos fur. She held up the torch in her right hand and said, "I swore that I would pledge my loyalty to the one who killed my father."

When Haides told her what had happened, Hekate and Haides looked at where Kerberos gnawed on a very particularly relevant set of bones. The green head lifted and whined until Haides scratched between their ears. Haides said, "Then you'll pledge your loyalty to myself and the dog.

Hekate grimaced. "That would be a choice." She lifted her chin. "One I will make." 

Just then the earth shook, as the hundred handed Hekatonkheires pounded at the walls of their prison. While deeper in the pit, the Kyklopes storm raged against their prison. It was nothing new. They had been raging for a very long time. Hekate lit the way as Haides went to free his uncles for the war that would come.

After that day, there were sides in the war.

After that day, the Hekatonkheires swore their loyalty by the Styx to serve the one who'd freed them. They were more than happy to stay in the land Gaia had created for them.

The Kyklopes were more than happy to never return to the dark lands. To swear their loyalty to Zeus. To do whatever the storm god said.

After Haides' first battle, it became his custom to pour the lamentations of the Titans that he had killed into the Kokytos river, which would moan forever after with their voices. 

There was another river too. This river came from his tears, for in those days Haides shed such things. Friends lost in the war. Perhaps he ran out of tears. Haides wept a river of them into the Akheron, and the river of woe wept ever after.

The river Lethe was there before him. The river of forgetting. Gaia had made that river themself when Ouranos imprisoned her children. 

Haides never drank from that river. Never. He never wanted to forget. 

This was how Haides was lord of the realm beneath the earth. This was why he had a dog.

##  Destroyer of Worlds

Hestia was the first born. Was the first consumed. The longest in their father's stomach. She was alone for a long time. Lonely years in bile soup quenching her. Wetly burning her. Keeping her small. Always hungry. When her father swallowed Haides, she'd cried because she'd been so very lonely and now there was someone to hold. She hated herself for so longing for a fellow prisoner.

She spent many years holding Haides up. He glowed when he first came to join her. She cried again when she understood how the bile burned glow away. Hestia's arms strained to hold Demeter above the acid. She spent many years listening to Hera perched on Haides' shoulders singing to cheer them up. She spent years listening to Poseiden shout. 

She cried as her siblings escaped one by one. Certain somehow she was going to be left behind. She gave way to anger when she was alone. She was so full of rage that she burned, such that Kronos was not sorry to have her out.

Hestia was the last to be thrown out of her father's mouth. Raging, she fell into the center of the room. Her flesh tattered by acid for decades exploded with flames once she was in the open air and so was born fire. She blazed through the metal fortress. Consumed furnishings. She knocked over Krios when he tried to stop her with a blast of mountain cold. Raced into the grassland beyond. She ran faster than a bird can fly. Consuming everything. Burning higher and hotter. Devouring forests. She created her own weather; she was so vast. Black clouds plumed hideous feathers from her back. Storms of spinning fire from the whirlwind vacuum of her hunger. Her anger. She was a big and obvious target.

None of the Titans followed her. Not even Kronos.

"Stop! You have to stop!" she heard a voice call call out.

She paused in her racing. In any case, there was a wide deep barren place carved into the hillside. She could have jumped over it, but there was a Titan standing in the middle. 

He held up his hands. "Please, if you don't stop, you'll destroy every living thing in the world. You'll burn the land and boil the sea."

For a moment, freshly emerged from the wound-mouth of her father, she wanted nothing but to do just that. But an Erotes struck her with an arrow. She looked at the world full of green growing things and fell in longing love. She looked at the Titan, who was in the world, and loved him too.

This was how Hestia met Prometheus. 

This was how she spent the first few moments of her second birth. Angry. Devouring. Destroying. Falling in love, she laughed. Saw a beloved unknown face laugh back. Learned his name. 

Prometheus said, "I've been waiting for you. We're going to do great things." He tapped the side of his head. "I see the future." He shrugged. "Sometimes."

She looked at him with fresh new eyes even as her flesh cooled to an ashen tone with shifting veins where a fire's glow shone through. Even ones with no ability to see the future, and she smiled. She laughed. She who could be a destroyer of worlds held back for love. 

This was how fire was born.

#  The End of the War

This isn't really the story of the war. The battles that were fought. The bitter blood that was spilled on land that spawned strange flowers and tender birds with burning eyes. Wastelands of thorny brambles that writhed and moved. Sand mites that swarmed like biting tears. No, this isn't really that story.

After a decade of war, the gods came to the final battle. Now because Metis knew many things, she'd thought about the peace that would come after the war.

She knew if Kronos, imbued with the blood of Ouranos, were to have his own last blood be spilled on the earth, the creatures that would come from that blood would ravage the world. 

There was only one of the gods who was suited to the task of holding Kronos and not killing him, so she approached Haides. Before she even opened her mouth, he said, "I know what you want. I will do it." He stared at her steadily. "The end of time would be too soon for the beast to escape a prison."

So it was when the last stronghold of the Titans fell, Haides was there to see that Kronos was well bound in chains made from the light of Hera's stars and Haides' darkness. 

Kronos shouted at them as he was taken away. "It is the fate of the son to overthrow the father." He sneered at Metis. "Zeus, if you keep her near you, you will be overthrown in your turn. Her children will be clever. A brilliant daughter and a son who will rule after you."

Zeus laughed at Kronos. "I don't fear my children." 

Metis suppressed a wry thought that that was fortunate given how many children he already had, because that was not important. What was important was the end goal. The peace that was going to follow this victory. Letting the future finally grow.

So began the age of the gods.


	2. Birth of Agriculture

In the heady days after the war was over, Demeter was wild as wheat. Raving as the vines covering the hill. Not a trellis in sight. 

Free of the prison of her father's making. Free of the war. She was free. 

That didn't stop the nightmares. She'd spent a long time in the dark. Waded in the blood of her enemies. Screwed when she had an itch. Screamed when she needed to scream. Lived. Nature was wild. Nature raved in the dark of night under the cold stars. She partied the night of Metis wedding. Metis had helped her clean herself up the next day.

Metis always helped Demeter clean herself up.

Metis left.

Everyone always left. She didn't know what had happened. All she knew was Hera got Zeus to dump the best and most brilliant Okeanid. A pile of wet weeds in exchange for an oak. Just like that, Metis was gone. 

Demeter told everyone, "I'm fine," at Hera's wedding. She was just fine. Demeter was the life of the gods be damned party. She danced long into the night outside of the stupid little cottage where her mother lived. The mother who'd let their father eat them. She screamed, "Screw you," at least once during the reception. She screwed a storm deity. She thought it was the stupid one, but based on the bruises it might have been the violent one. She told herself it was fine.

She danced. She partied. As long as she wasn't sleeping, she didn't have nightmares.

She created the poppy. She created the sweet absolution that came from the poppy. She made that. For herself. She didn't want any dark places inside of her. She was all green and growing. She needed to be green and growing. Everything needed to be light and happiness. Everything was fixed and it was all fine. There were no dark spaces. No caves in her mind.

She was the wild wheat not yet tamed into rows. She was the uncultivated fruiting tree not yet contained. The uninhibited cattle roaming free. The roaming goats on their mountain peaks. The sheep not yet shorn. The boisterous bramble with sharp thorns. 

How she partied and celebrated. Joked and laughed. 

When Poseiden called Haides a dry stick, she'd said, "That stick has no sap." Miracled a brittle twig to snap over her knee. She flopped the bent and broken thing around by the bark still holding the pieces together. She laughed and laughed and laughed. If she stopped laughing she thought she might break the dam. So she wasn't going to stop.

She didn't think about Haides holding her when she slumped in their father's belly. Kept her from falling into the bile. The constant quiet crack and hiss as Hestia and Haides' flesh burned and healed in the acid.

She didn't think about that. She never thought about that. Never. Not while she had poppy. Not while she had dancing. Not while she had parties. Not while she was bending the branches she called arms to entertain her fellow soldiers. 

Soldiers and civilians. 

That's how she divided things and those who hadn't fought in the war weren't worth shit. She said that all the time. She hardly knew what she said most days. 

She hardly knew what happened with Zeus. She'd made him angry. They fought. She remembered that. She didn't remember what she'd said or why she'd said it. Or why she did what she did what she did next. Maybe she was angry with Hera about Metis. Maybe despair clawed at her. She grappled with Zeus as she wanted. She showed Hera how a goddess might act. She thought she'd taken the shape of a serpent. It was all a little blurry. She thought she remembered that Zeus had taken the shape of a dragon. Blurry flashes of memory with certain moments in sharp and sudden relief. Like shadows cast by the spines of mountains. The bones of Titans she'd killed in the war.

Afterwards, she went to talk to Zeus. He said, "What are you talking about? You came onto me. Asked to be my wife. As if I wasn't married to Hera." He tapped his lighting bolt on the ground. "As I wasn't the king of the gods. As if you hadn't sworn your loyalty to me by the Styx to have all that you have." He laughed at her. "What I've given, I can take back if you're going to go on about it."

She'd divided the world into soldiers and civilians. Wolves and sheep. Wild lettuce and harvested rows. Strong and weak. She hadn't realized that she'd been shrinking her world. 

She stumbled away. She saw Artemis sitting there with her silver bow. She'd loomed over the child. "If you remain a virgin your whole life, I'll give you the forests. All the wild places." 

"Uh," said Artemis. 

She bent down and glared into the girl's eyes. 

"Swear that you'll never have anything to do with a man and I'll give the forests to you," Demeter said fiercely. Desperately. Holding back the floods behind her eyes.

Was relieved when Artemis nodded. Her hair silvery in the morning sun. "That's nothing I don't want to give away." She looked down at herself. Youthful as a child. "I'll stay like this and love the forest always." 

Demeter kissed Artemis' forehead. A tear making a break from captivity. She felt something dark and deep breath as she gave her forests away. But it had to be done. Demeter was dividing the world. Giving away parts of herself. 

Hestia from her place by the fire watched. She kept her fire low. Inconspicuous. Hera and Zeus were arguing. 

Hestia wasn't watching that. She was looking at Demeter being quiet. Nature was never quiet. Still sometimes, but not quiet. At first she thought it was because Demeter had been up all night. Again. Then Demeter looked up. Then she saw Demeter's clothing. She knew. Of course Hestia knew. She slept by the fire. 

Demeter pulled out her pipe and lit it slowly with trembling hands. Apollon drifted over not long after, pestering her for a puff. For once, Demeter didn't send him away. She looked right through him, but she didn't send him away. She handed him the pipe. 

Apollon smiled and took the pipe. Breathed in deeply. Coughed a bit on the exhale. Laughed high in his head and strummed on his lyre.

The sound was beautiful, but Demeter pulled away from him. Hestia said, "Sister, come sit by me by the fire."

"Cinder sisters," laughed young Hermes. "Hey, dad, look cinder sisters. Wood and ash." He danced around a little bit. 

Zeus chuckled. For a moment, happy to laugh at them. 

Hestia looked closely at Demeter and asked, "Are you well." She wasn't, because she didn't push Hestia away. She didn't go to sit next to Poseiden. She didn't go to talk to the Kyklopes. Her friends who she'd fought beside during the war. She didn't even call Hestia a sheep. She stayed where she was. Silently.

She was still sitting there when Apollon stood up on his seat and strummed that lyre of his. The sound was beautiful. The notes of his humming made the hairs on the back of Hestia's neck stand up. She wasn't the only one. All around the room, everyone stopped talking. They looked at where Apollo's shadow stretched and slithered on the ground. Except his shadow wasn't black, but golden. The curse of Delphyne was on him while he prophesied an heir for Zeus from death and nature. 

Hermes ran off to find Artemis to deal with him when he fainted after the prophecy left him.

Eris, her voice drilling into Hestia's ears, said, "Looks like dad's going to have an heir after all. Thought you'd dodged the bullet when Metis left, but I guess not. Only one nature, so not hard to figure out Demeter's going to be popping out a...."

A thunderbolt slammed into the floor sending sparks in all directions. Zeus stood on his dias above them all. The bellows of his ch est heaving. Eyes wild. "I do not have an heir." 

Into this delightful scene, Hermes returned with Artemis, who took one look at her brother and sighed. She moved to heave him over one shoulder as she might a dead deer, but Apollon revived and blearily batted at her hands. She moved in a sort of dance with him. Weary and loving. She'd done this dance many times. 

Demeter, in the chaos, moved back one step. Two steps. Froze in the shadow of the room. Hestia packed up her traveling oven. Hestia said, "Come on Demeter, we need to go."

"Go where? There's nowhere to go. Even the sun is false." Demeter laughed high and thin. A disastrous harvest.

"Come on." Hestia pulled on Demeter until she moved. Hestia didn't have a chariot of gold. She didn't have flying shoes. She borrowed Artemis' silver chariot. The flying deer weren't easy to guide, but they found their way easily enough. 

Hestia found her way. To the one place she could think of that was safe. A place that wasn't safe at all. Still, her heart longing, she went to Prometheus chained on his mountain. Not that he was alone. Not at all. 

Of course, she'd known. After all, there was a fire in the hearth place of the tower that the mortals had built. After all, each day when a bull was sacrificed to feed the entrails to the giant eagles came, the mortals cooked the rest of the meat on her hearth. All hearths were hers.

Hestia smiled to see the sacrifices Prometheus' children made, and warmed her sister through her confinement. 

Confined to a stone tower on a stone mountain listening to eagles eat the entrails of a sacrifice. 

Confinement. As if this was the war with the Titans where they dared not be seen.

Demeter waited. Growing more and more certain that something was wrong. More and more certain it was because of what she'd done. Through it all, she stayed out of the sight of the spying sun. While the people who lived on the mountain gathered wheat. Demeter ground the stuff up into flour. She watered it with her tears and let the wild yeast have its way. She fed that dough, that start of something, like she would a child. While she grew the children inside her. She knew something was wrong. She was the goddess of nature. She'd given the forests away.

They had been there several months when Hermes found them. He opened his mouth and Demeter said, "I'm having two girls." She turned to face the wall. "Zeus can stop worrying. Whoever Apollon was talking about, it wasn't me."

"That's not what I was here to ask at all," said Hermes with a smile. "You wound me. Utterly pierce me with your slings and arrows." He never said what he was there for.

He left soon after.

Leaving Demeter to feed the starter, while Hestia worried. Days passed. Months. 

Finally, screaming, Nature gave birth to one child alive and one child dead. 

Hestia burned the still little body that had never breathed. She burned it to ash that settled on the living child like a blanket. Like a shadow that melted away.

Kore wailed. Fussing at every little thing from the moment she was born. She wasn't like other gods. She didn't speak. She didn't walk. She melted down over every little change. But then Demeter knew that Kore had to know that her twin, little Peresphone, the light to her darkness, the bringer of death, had been stillborn. That was why she didn't laugh. Why she didn't speak until she was three times the age of all the other god's children. A lot longer than lettuce Hebe. A lot longer than red faced Ares. Apollo. Artemis. Hermes.

While Demeter was grieving, Hestia went down to her fire. She took some of the dough and kneaded it. She braided it. Gently brushed it with olive oil. Laid it down to rest. Cradled it next to her fire where the dough lifted and rose. Firmed to a golden crust. She left the bread for Demeter. Warm and comforting. The smell filing the whole tower.

She gave the bread to her sister, when she left with her infant. Demeter went as far from mountains and sea as she could get. 

Demeter made the crops grow. The fields were hers. Demeter made the crops grow. She helped mortals thrive. She made grain grow tall in ordered rows. Barley and oats and rye. Millet and farro and sorghum. Wheat. She made dough. A comfort to tend with cultivated yeast. A comfort to kneed. To braid. To lovingly bake by the fire that belonged to her sister. 

She inhaled the sweet poppy and let it dull the edges of the world. Demeter learned her lesson. Better to stay in the fields ready for the plough. Wheat in rows. Better to keep her head down and grow the crops. Trellis her vines. She tried to teach her daughter to be careful. The one that lived. The one that didn't die because Demeter had been too wild. To unrestrained. 

She didn't think about that either. Not while she had poppy. Not while she had her work in the fields. Not while she kept her face down. While Kore solemley examined rocks in the earth. 

This was how agriculture came to be.This was how bread came to first be made. A gift from one sister to another. 


	3. First Winter

It was called a tale as old as time. A beautiful young woman kidnapped by a beast. The ruler of the underworld. 

Some things to keep in mind. This girl's name was Kore. That name meant girl or maiden. And by the by, Demeter's name meant earth mother, which meant everything about them up to that point could be summed up as mother and daughter. 

Now Demeter hid Kore away from the other gods, largely because most of them were a sack of dicks and Demeter wanted no part of all that.

The warning she gave her daughter all the time was, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will beat the shit out of them and kill them." Then a whole lot of rules around how to avoid being seduced. As if she was too weak to know what she wanted.

Her whole life Kore knew she was a warped surface that Demeter must hide. Put it in a box. Then lock that box. Then take that locked box and put it in another box. Then drop that box down deep into a hole in the earth where the sun would never see it. 

Demeter was in a box of her own. Fond of smoking opium from poppies, and as it happened Apollon was also fond of smoking the same. Apollon, because he wanted to get high and prophesize, and Demeter because when she was low she wanted the weasel thoughts in her head to shut up so her heart would stop pounding like a rainstorm on a rock. 

Kore knew she had a twin when she was born. She knew that much. But her twin had been born dead and hadn't gotten a name. Demeter wore mourning black for her dead baby girl. Always. Also, she always carried around an adamantine sickle. 

Once when she was poppy low, she told Kore, "The beast who ate me as a baby," she meant her father, "used this blade to slice off grandpa's dick so he could be king." Demeter had used that sickle as her weapon in the war to end all wars, which was to say it wasn't the first war and hadn't ended war at all. "That was how love was born." She let go of the sickle so it was hanging off her cestas belt. She held up her clay pipe and inhaled sweet smoke. After she exhaled a plume, she said, "If I'd used it when I was younger, if I'd partied less, kept my head down, then sky-dick wouldn't have seduced me." 

What Kore heard from what Demeter said was if she'd done that then she wouldn't have had Kore. 

All Kore's life, it was mostly just Kore and Demeter, and the Sirens. River nymphs. But that was a situation that wasn't going to last forever. Eventually, she'd grow up.

Eventually, Zeus sent Hermes on down with a message. Kore was to be presented on high Olympos.

"We're not going anywhere," said Demeter flatly. "Kore isn't ready for Olympos. She needs to stay here where it's calm and quiet." She meant safe.

What Kore heard was that she should keep her warped self locked up.

Hermes' expression changed. It was subtle. He took off his wide brimmed travelers' hat and laid it gently on the kitchen table. He put down his herald's wand. "If you choose not to accompany your daughter, then so be it."

Demeter's expression made Kore think of a cloud of smoke in a burning field. Her mama turned away. She didn't argue. But she made dough for bread, which she wrapped in a cool wet cloth in a basket. She insisted they take her chariot pulled by winged serpents, who should not be confused with dragons. 

Dragons had claws. Dragons had sharp and massive teeth. Dragons were fierce whether they guarded a spring or laid waste to travelers along the roads.

The winged serpents were gentle creatures with smiling toothless mouths and long slender tongues that would lick Kore when she oiled their scales and fed them the mice that plagued Demeter's fields. 

Dragons also smiled, but those smiles were only for their own pleasure.

At first Olympos was just a cloud wreathed mountain. Below the ring of clouds were clustered golden buildings and around that a golden wall. 

They went through the golden gates and were confronted with white marble buildings and white marble tiles. Screwed into the marble were huge slabs of gold covered in images. Dead stone. Kore felt just how overwhelmingly cold and dead it was. In her head, she'd imagined that Olympos was like home, but larger. There was no clay. No hint of the soil on which the palaces of Olympos must sit. She hadn't expected that. 

Too soon as far as Demeter was concerned, they arrived and stood in the great plaza. The one she dreaded seeing most stood waiting to greet them.

Hera. Her sister who she had held in her arms in the dark of their father's belly. Who had sung to her brothers and sisters to keep their spirits up during the long years of darkness. Demeter shoved that thought into the dark.

"Hera," said Demeter, her right hand wrapped firmly over Kore's shoulder. As always, her daughter squirmed and twitched at being touched. "You look well."

"Isn't this nice," said Hera in a bitter lettuce tone. "The sister who betrayed me and seduced my husband thinks I look well. How wonderful."

Demeter did not dig her fingers into Kore's shoulder. She must be as careful as if Kore were dough. She wanted to protest that she hadn't betrayed her sister with Zeus. But that was the thought that had lingered for an age. 

Hera's face flushed despite all the cold Olympian marble. "Are you still fucking him?"

"Uh… I'll go get Athena," said Hermes. Abandoning them. 

Demeter looked around radiant Olympos. Horrible Olympos with all its marble and stones. Not a tree or leaf to the place. "No. If I had my way, I'd have never come back." She did what she always did. She let go of Kore. She pulled out her pipe and she took needed relief. Shadows flickering at the edges of her heart.

"Why did you do it?" Hera glared at Demeter. "Why did you betray me like that? Not content with Poseidon snapping at your heels, you wanted my husband too! Why?" Hera pulled back her teeth in a snarl. She accused her sister of wanting to be queen of the gods. She accused her of many things. 

Demeter pushed Kore away so she wouldn't hear what Hera had to say. 

Kore left them. She heard what was on the surface, but not what lay beneath.

Of course, Hestia came between them. Sheltering them both. Of course, Demeter found her way to the old complaint. "At least I didn't seduce Zeus like you did to get him away from Metis." Demeter ached with missing Metis. She'd have straightened this out.

Hera blinked weary eyes. "What? No. Metis, no...I've always loved Zeus. I wanted to marry him." Tears streamed down Hera's cheeks. She pulled her feather mantle tight. Made a parting shot of, "I hate you." 

Demeter watched her sister go. She inhaled another puff from her pipe and held everything inside.

"This is going to be a long festival," said Hestia softly. A leaf falling in the forest soft.

As to Kore, she'd gotten lost three turns away from the great courtyard. 

She stood in a wide marble arcade a few twisty turns from where she'd left Demeter, when a tall girl with silver hair and a pack of dogs found her, "Kore!" Swept her up a quick short hug without asking. Kore knew she was supposed to smile back. So she smiled. 

The girl said, "Sorry, it's just I've heard so much about you. I'm Artemis." She tilted her head. "You look a bit lost."

"Yes," said Kore quickly. "Do you know where I should go?"

"Sure," said Artemis. "Follow me." She led Kore to a wide building many times larger than her own home. Up a cold marble staircase past golden furniture into a room dominated by a wide bed with a golden frame and a fat mattress. There was only one bed. She had never been in a room with only one bed in it. At home, they all slept in a common room. Her mama and the Sirens and herself.

Artemis laughed at her expression. "Grand isn't it. Dad does love his," she waved at the golden bed and the linen cloth hanging like columns next to the wide windows, "bling. I prefer my forests, but he wants us here." 

Kore looked around. She still only saw one bed. "Where will I sleep?" 

"The bed," said Artemis with a pleasant smile.

"But…" Kore looked around the room again as if expecting another giant bed to appear. "Where will Mama sleep?"

"In her own ridiculously large bed in her own ridiculously large room, which since she's one of the Olympian gods is even ridiculously larger." Artemis' smile didn't reach her eyes. "Great Zeus has given all the Olympian gods their own palaces." She stroked the silky fur of a red haired dog. "Except Hestia. She sleeps by the fire. She's not an Olympian now." She looked away. "It hardly matters. 

Kore moved closer to the bed. "I've never slept alone by myself in a room."

Artemis kept on smiling. "With all my puppers here," she stroked a brindled dog's ear as wolfish looking dog snuffled her leg. "I wouldn't mind being granted more room."

"You have a palace that you share with your brother." A tall slender grey-eyed woman with tightly bound black hair came in through the open doorway. There was a thin leather strap across her bodice attached to a round bronze shield on her back. "There is no more room except up inside Olympos' walls." She held out her right hand to Kore. "It's good to meet you, Kore. I'm Athena. I had hoped to get this here before you arrived, but you know how it is. No plan survives contact with the battlefield." 

Kore was relieved. Handshaking was better than hugging. She knew what to do with hand shakes. Three shakes and let go. Firm, but not too firm. Smile, but that was always the rule. Not touching would be better. But handshakes were better than hugs.

Athena unfolded a blanket. "I wanted you to have this for your room." 

Kore had never seen anything like it. Rather than a simple wave or key pattern, the blanket was covered in a riot of flowers that moved slowly by an unseen breeze. Kore reached out hesitantly to touch the pattern. "It's soft." In the midst of the threads she could feel a blessing. A miracle of protection. Threads soaked in some ancient blood. She almost asked why. She almost asked whose, but she was tired of feeling foolish and lost. 

Athena snapped the blanket in the air so it settled down over the bed. "There. A nice and cozy welcome gift." She clasped her hands "Now let's leave Kore to get settled." She linked her arm through Artemis' and towed her away. The dogs heaved themselves off the floor and soon followed. 

They left before Kore could ask about the blessing.

Instead Kore reveled in a room not shared with a dozen Sirens. A room to herself. If she was perfectly still, there were no voices. No eyes on her. There was not a sound but the breeze against the shutters. She arranged her garments by color in the chest at the foot of the bed. She arranged the nuts and stones she'd brought with her to settle her. Ground her. She loved the quiet. 

At least until dinner.

The rest of Olympos was not quiet.

When Kore and Demeter went to the feast hall in the main palace, Hera took one look at them and curled her lips. Her dress was brilliant purple and covered with actual stars. It matched the feather cloak she was wearing even though it was very hot in the hall. 

All the noise in the hall hurt Kore's ears. Demeter had already begun to self medicate.

Kore put a smile on her face. She was still smiling at Artemis' dogs, when Apollon brushed up against her on his way to his dining couch. She yelped. 

Apollon said, "Jeeze, relax. It was just an accident. Butt to butt gods here tonight." He fluffed his hair and said, "Hey, Auntie Demie, I'm a little low right now. If I could bum a whiff or two that'd be cool."

Demeter handed Apollon her pipe. While Kore reminded herself that it was an accident he'd brushed up against her. Some other god she didn't know did the same thing. It was an accident. Accidentally groped her breast. An accident. Her thigh. All accidents that she wasn't meant to comment on. She'd been told that often enough. Smile. Say nothing. Normal gods liked to be touched.

Kore did what she was supposed to do. She was quiet. She didn't make a scene. No crops to blight anyway in a gold gilt hall.

She sat next to her mama, and drew her legs up onto the couch. She counted the tiles on the floor to try to drown out the sound of the voices all around her. She kept losing her count. 

The gathering crowd waited. And waited. 

Ares shouted, "If we wait for dad to show up, we'll starve. Let's just eat." 

Kore was hungry. But her belly was twisting so much, she didn't know if she could.

Hera's face twisted and her eyes got very wet. 

Ares said, "Ma, I didn't mean that he's fucking around. I meant… I meant… um…"

"That you have firmly placed your foot in your mouth," said Athena. She had a very quiet voice. Kore liked the way it sounded. Firm as a rock rooted in the deep earth. Athena said, "Hebe, fill everyone's glasses while we wait for Father." 

Hebe filled their cups. The room got louder and louder. Kore wanted to cover her ears with her hands, but that would be strange. Queer. Freakish. So she didn't. She kept her warped boxed self tight. 

Zeus flew into the feasting hall in the shape of a great eagle and all sound stopped. A blissful silence broken when he boomed, "I see how it is. Here I slave to serve my people. Always putting everyone else first, and you begin the feast without me."

"No, my love," said Hera hastily. "It wasn't like that at all."

"You probably did it out of jealousy and spite," said Zeus. "You probably…" he trailed off as he caught sight of Kore. "Kore, you're here. Let me look at you." He pulled her off her couch, and she almost stumbled. "Look how tall you've gotten. How beautiful. Turn around. Let me see you."

Kore felt all eyes on her, but she dutifully turned around. 

"Lovely. Beautiful. Incandescent. A daughter a man could be proud of. Certainly more beautiful than anything the old heifer pumped out of her loins." 

Kore could feel heat filling her cheeks. Hera narrowed her eyes and was staring at her. Kore really didn't like people staring at her. 

"Please," said Demeter. "You're embarrassing Kore. She's not used to Olympos."

"And whose fault is that. You're the one who stayed away." Zeus laughed. It was a loud sound that echoed around the room. He said, "But my girl, I'll have to invent new epithets to describe you. Look at those dainty-ankles." She looked down at her own ankles and they were just ankles. They were attached to her feet. Full of ichor and bones. He said, "Athena, my clever girl, mark my words, this girl will go far. Now I need a poem. Someone get one of my Muses out here. I need a poem for my beautiful daughter. Something with me in it." He pulled Kore so she sat next to him. Then all eyes were on the Muse and that was fine.

That Muse crafted a vision out of the smoke and air. Kore recognized herself in it. Although, thankfully, her own part was minor in comparison to Sky-Father Zeus. Still it was flattering. It meant that her father at least thought she had what it took to be an Olympian god. That maybe she didn't need to hide away. 

The evening went on. Apollon played music and didn't get so high that he spouted a prophecy. Eris and Melpomene came over and told Kore that was something that Apollon did sometime. Eris told Kore about the nymphs the gods had seduced, "Or you know, just had sex." 

Demeter spent the entire feast wreathed in sweet poppy from her pipe dreading the end of the evening. 

Finally, the evening did end. Sort of. This was where things got a bit wonky. Maybe not the way you think a story as old as time goes, but it did. 

Kore and Demeter went back to their palace. Well, not their palace. Not a home they owned with doors with locks where only Demeter had the key. A palace Zeus had given Demeter to use when she was on Olympos. Where there were no locks because there was no need for them. None at all. 

Demeter went to her room, cloaked in night terrors that she was determined not to put on her daughter. She spent the night sleepless, wreathed in smoke, holding her adamantine sickle and listening to the storm outside her window with a horror as deep as the bottom of a grain silo and about as suffocating.

Meanwhile, Kore changed into her warmest night clothing, because Olympos was cold with the gathering storm battering at the shuttered windows. She folded up her clothing in the trunk at the foot of the bed. She set aside her sandals so they were exactly even with the tile they were sitting on. She liked it when things were even. Sorted by color. To counter the sound of the wind, she counted the tiles on the floor and accounted for the ones under the rug. The shutters rattled. A flash of light followed by a crash of thunder.

She kept counting. There were two-hundred and fifty eight tiles. She began again as the storm outside began to dump what seemed like an ocean of rain. 

The door opened and a Kyklopes came in without so much as a knock. He said, "Sky Father Zeus noticed you didn't eat much at dinner. He wants to share a quieter supper and discuss your place here among the Olympians." 

She clutched at her blanket and said faintly, "I'm in bed."

"But you're clearly awake," said Kyklopes.

This was a moment where later Kore blamed herself. She shouldn't have, but she did. She followed the Kyklopes to where Zeus waited in a room of gold. While the Kyklopes served them nectar and ambrosia. The nectar wasn't watered. Stronger than she was used to. It made her feel giggly at the same time relaxed. Flattered. She was flattered by the way Zeus described her. Yet, she felt under every compliment a steady stream that her place on Olympos was dependent on Zeus' good will. That her freedom from the farm depended on pretty ankles and flushing cheeks.

She felt so stupid later. She went to splash water on her face. She mumbled what she needed and Zeus chuckled. He pointed to a door. She went and did what she needed nervously. When she came back out, Zeus had changed. Quite literally changed into the shape of a golden dragon, but his eyes were the same. Glittering like the sapphires on the wall. He was also very naked. He was also very obviously a male dragon. 

She stood there uncertain of what to do. Fuzzy headed. Blinking. 

She wanted to leave and she wanted to stay on Olympos. She wanted to feel good. As if she were not a warped box. She didn't feel like she could do anything but be pushed towards the bed by the Kyklopes. Zeus kept talking about how beautiful she was. How she'd have a place as an Olympian. She wanted to fit in. 

This would be the part where Zeus seduced her in the shape of a dragon. A tale as old as time. 

Afterwards, she left the golden room feeling sick. Feeling dirty in a way that had little to do with fields. Only to find a Kyklopes waiting. Who gripped by her arm hard enough to hurt. Who said, "Not so fast missy. Gotta clean up a bit for the boss. You gotta swear on the Styx not to say anything about this. Swear your loyalty to our king and you'll have all that you've been offered. If not," he twisted his hand to make clear what the not would be. 

She stared at the giant. She did the only thing she could think to do. She turned into a hawk and flew from his grip. 

She wasn't thinking about where. Guided by her shadow, guided by the sister who'd died, she ended up in front of a clay palace. Now earth goddess as she was, clay was not much of a barrier to her so she didn't bother with the door. She just went on through a wall. Pressed her back against the clay wall and stood there heart pounding. When it was clear no one was going to pound down the door or the wall, she sank to the clay floor. Her feet were bare. She realized she'd left her shoes behind. Her bare feet rested on the earth. The actual earth. Not marble. Just bare dirt that had been left uncovered. There with her bare feet on the ground and her shoes missing, her body and soul hurting, she cried. Not to escape, but to try and let the feeling out. 

She didn't know it, but she was in the palace of Haides. It was empty, because that particular god would rather be skinned than spend more than a minute more than he had to on Olympos.

The Receiver of All. The Rich One. The Giver of Good Counsel. The Unseen. Actually, that's what the name Haides meant. Unseen. He had an aegis of shadows. Hiding. It was a thing. But in this case he was unseen in his palace because he wasn't there.

He was in his kingdom stealing himself to go up to Olympos for the festival of Diasia. His mistress Minthe wanted to attend the feast. She thought she was one step from being a queen. She thought many things.

It was a kindness that he didn't invite her. A dire sort of festival. A gift for his sister, Hestia. A three day period of mourning at the end of which souls who had killed a relative or were haunted by a shade who refused to pass over into the underworld could make an offering. If he judged their offering worthy, Haides freed them of their blood debt. All of this by the way happened in the middle of the night next to a hole in the ground with a dead animal dripping blood into the hole.

Haides loved his sister enough to leave his underworld and go up to Olympos to cleanse the mortals she loved. He was capable of love. He had a dog. It was just his understanding of love was very transactional. Where he had the power to give and withhold what people wanted.

Haides arrived at his palace to find a woman crying as if her heart were a shattered box. Not just any woman, but a woman with two souls. Kore's twin sister was still there. A shadow. An echo. The shade of a goddess who'd never gotten to live and a goddess who was full of life.

He didn't realize it at first, because the little bastard Erotes were all over, but an Erotes shot him in the heart. So he didn't tell the two souled goddess to get the Tartaros out of his palace so he could unpack his clothes and rest before three utterly miserable days on his little brother's overdone mountain. He sat down next to her on the floor. He didn't touch her. He could see into her heart. He knew she was in pain, but not why. He knew she was a Lady of Sorrow. He knew he wanted her to be his more than anything. More than the sudden freedom from the sucking pit. More than the peace of mind in a wide field of asphodel. More than all the precious metals of the earth, which were his. 

It was pitch black in the room. The only light was Kore's. She, like all gods, had a faint glow. Well, not Haides, who had lost his shine long ago. In the dark, he wrapped his protective aegis of impenetrable shadows around himself and was darker still. He didn't want her to look at him. Not just yet. He had to all accounts a very unsettling appearance. 

Now Kore was not unaware that someone, something had joined her, but she was very tired. Worn out by everything. She told the shadow, "It's all my fault."

A voice as deep as a well with a locked box inside it answered with a question. "Why do you think that?"

"Because I knew. Because I went. Because I didn't say no." She looked at the shadow, which being a shadow she couldn't see through. 

She left before the conversation could progress because she couldn't bear to say another word. She left him there with the pool of her tears on the floor.

Parsimonious as he was, he miracled them into a golden vial. Wounded as he was by Eros arrow, which to be clear was no excuse and he knew that, he returned to the underworld and drove straight for river Acheron, which had been made by his own tears. He dropped the vial into the river, which boiled and bubbled. 

He didn't mean not to tell Minthe that what they had was over. He simply wanted to be back on Olympos where the Lady of Sorrows was. The lady he meant to be his.

He raced back to Olympos on his chariot pulled by his deathless and tireless horses. Arrived back on Olympos with no real idea where his Lady of Sorrows was or where she lived or really anything. 

During all of this, Kore had gone back to Demeter's palace. She washed herself until even undying flesh bled. Until she tumbled into the courtyard and saw her mother. Demeter was as low as Kore had ever seen her. In a moment where Kore was very low herself. When she needed comfort from her mother. 

Neither of them said anything to each other, and the opportunity was lost.

Kore went to break her morning fast. She was greeted by Eris and Melpomene looking fresh and bright. Eris said, "How did you sleep last night?"

"Inquiring minds want to know," said Melpomene. She leaned closer and said in a very loud whisper, I got it from Io who had it from Alpheus that you had a little post feast tete-a-tete with Zeus." She licked her red painted lips. "Is it true? Tell me it's true?"

Kore stared at Melpomene, who had their father's nose. Kore left them only to be confronted by Erato, the muse of erotic poetry. She asked loudly over some eggs, "Did Zeus really seduce you in the form of a dragon." She meant charmed. Enticed into sexual activity.

Kore felt all the blood in her body drain into her feet. Erato had their father's curling hair and forehead.

Kore took this opportunity to leave. She didn't go far. She went down to the garden overlooking the land below. Controlled plants in marble pots. Trees too, constrained and straining with their weakened roots at the marble. She could feel those roots itching to be free. Feel the limbs constrained into shapes.

The garden overlooked the high thick walls of Olympos. She looked down. She thought about jumping over, but Eris had said that Hephestos had been thrown off of Olympos by his own mother and all that had happened was he couldn't walk. A god might fall, but they wouldn't die of it.

She was so full in that moment that she screamed into the empty garden. She let loose every bit of rage inside of her. She urged the trapped trees in their pots to break through the marble. She did the same with the trapped flowers. She screamed and pale roots cracked stone. Burrowed through marble and into the earth below. Grew taller and taller. Higher and higher. Crowded the sky with green leaves. 

She screamed until her throat was raw and she was standing in a vibrant orchard full of broken stones. 

That was when she saw the shadow walk into the garden. She saw the shadows peel back to reveal a tattered shadow god. Haides. She knew who he was. 

Kore felt an arrow pierce her chest. She looked down at the arrow where it shimmered and melted away. Looked up at the naked boy with a bow fluttering above her. The Erotes said, "The Receiver of All will take your anger if you want to give it away." 

She longed to give away her rage. She didn't want to feel like she did. Haides was holding a weapon. A bident. He looked at her coldly, or so she thought.

Haides had come all that way to find her, and finding her, fled. Unready. Unpracticed as yet in what he wanted to say. 

Kore thought to herself about what the Erotes had told her. She thought about what Eris had told her the night before. An age before. She'd said, "I heard that those who have sex with Haides are poisoned. They say that they die." The thought it might be true was a weasel that took up residence in her mind. Kore was no longer a maiden. It was her fault. She hadn't resisted. She wanted to die. She was tired of being always warped and wrong.

She went to her room and dressed simply. She dressed in a winding sheet for death. She slid through the clay walls of his home, because by now she knew whose house it was. Once inside, she followed her shadow until she found him in his house of clay. He was alone. Looking at his darkness. She said nothing. She walked up to him and kissed him. Scrabbled at him. Grappled with him. Gripped his mouth with her own. Consumed the dire air she'd heard could be found between his lips. She didn't die of that. She tasted his mouth. Bit him to taste his blood. But that didn't kill her. Took him inside her fiercely. Moved so he would expend his seed inside her. In none of these acts did she die. 

When they were done, she screamed. She beat at her own chest. Scratched her own arms and legs. She heaved great lungfuls of air, because her throat was raw. Claimed her own body in pleasure and in pain.They lay apart on the ground where they'd coupled. She appreciated that. She could not have born to be touched just then.

There in the light of her body, he asked, "Did you come here to die, my Lady of Fury?"

"I thought I might." She teetered on the cliff of some conclusion. 

"Ah." He lay there in silence some time. Finally he said, "You have given me something of great value. What can I give you in return?" Haides understood exchange. 

She scraped her fingers down her thighs. "It was worth nothing." 

"Ah." He said again. To him what had happened was worth everything. An act of desire, if not one that could generate a child. He'd spent too long in the bile for that. But there were other ways. Tears in a river for one.

She waited silently next to him. Until her shadow restless and weary reached out into Haides' darkness. She didn't even notice. She was very tired. It was dark. Perhaps that was why her shadow felt it could move as it did. She sighed as it happened. As her shadow self mingled with his ancient aegis. The triple darkness that lived below. 

Haides sighed too. A catch of breath. He willed his eyes not to blink. Not to lose a moment of her. 

She asked, "If you threw your bident at me, would I die? A true death. One where I would not go to the world below?"

"You would die." His voice sounded as deep as a cave full of winding streams that suddenly burst into crystalline shapes. She recognized the resonance of it. "But then I would carry your blood debt forever. I who want to..." 

"I don't care what you want!" She didn't. She wanted something as formless as smoke. Needed it. She said, "One of the Erotes said you could take my rage. Will you?"

He answered with a question very much according to his nature. He asked, "What do you want for it?" She'd already given him so much. Two souled goddess with her heart in doubled shrouds.

All Kore wanted was to stop hurting. "It's free. I'm giving it away."

Haides told the clay, "I can take your rage and release it into the river of anger, the Phlegethon." He told the stone, "I want to join your rage with my own until it takes new life." He hardly dared say what he wanted.

In all fairness, no one had slept much. If Kore didn't think things through, it was hardly her fault that she screamed a high thin shriek from a raw throat. If she raked her fingers down his chest. 

Haides didn't resist. This was entirely what he wanted. He wanted exactly this. He caught her scream in a tight grip and stayed still as she left with her shadow. 

While Haides, he made the return trip to the underworld. He drove his chariot without stopping until he reached the Phlegethon. He released his Lady of Fury's shriek of rage into the molten stone of the raging river. The surface shivered as his Lady of Fury's scream battered its surface. The black and red liquid stone bubbled and boiled. It pained him. The river was a part of him. 

And then because he knew what he needed to do, because his Lady of Sorrows had given herself to him, that's how he thought of it, he went to the garden overlooking the Styx. A swamp created from his hatred, for there were no romantic spots in Tartaros, and summoned Minthe to meet him.

Minthe arrived with a brilliant smile that didn't match the murk of her river nymph heart. She said, "My Lord Haides, you're back early." She took light steps over to him. "Have you changed your mind? Am I to go to Olympos after all?" 

Of course, she knew where he'd gone. 

"No." He needed to head off this line of thinking entirely. He was here for a very different reason. 

"Have you decided to present me to Olympos as your queen?" She waved a hand covered in glittering rings at the sludge of the river Styx. "Am I to be queen of all this?"

"No." He moved away from her. He gave her the gift of distance. He said, "I will no longer send for you to share my bed."

"What? Why? What have I… Oh," Minthe's ring covered hands flew over her mouth. A beautiful mouth with a sad curve. Just not the one he desired. "But we were going to marry eventually."

He spoke very quickly before she could dress her heart with a new lie. "No, we were not."

"But," her heart beat faster. As fast as a stream can beat. "Why are you setting me aside? I'm beautiful. Perfect for you." Her eyes were full of tears. Not at losing him. At losing her place. 

"No." That at least was true. He owed her another truth. "I have met the woman who shall be queen of the underworld." He was certain that this would happen. He was very determined to make it happen. Because he was a precise sort of god, he added, "We have coupled in despair." 

He saw in Minthe's heart that she was certain he would change his mind. 

He said, "I will not," in answer to what she didn't say, but she wasn't listening. He told her, "All are welcome in my kingdom." 

She turned away from him and told the Styx, "My Lord Haides. It may be difficult to remain here seeing you. If you would, out of kindness for what we've been to each other, could I come with you to Olympos?"

"It would be no kindness," he warned her.

"Still, I have nowhere to go. Please, if you felt anything for me, I would like to see Olympos." 

He gave in. A mistake, but one he made. As they arrived, he told her again, "The doors of the underworld are open." 

He went to endure his time in the feasting hall of his younger brother. Watched his Lady of Fury sitting far from him. 

Minthe flitted like a brilliant shade among the nymphs and satyrs. Gods and demi-gods. Praising him. Flattering him. While his Lady of Fury glared at the floor. Lifted her eyes and saw him. Pierced him more than any Erotes arrow. 

While her thoughts were on the garden overlooking the mortal lands. It was no more. Not blighted as Kore would have done. Withering the plants. It had been blasted by lightning. A charred and smoking ruin. A warning. Much as when a Kyklopes pulled her aside and told her that she must swear her loyalty to her king upon the Styx or else there would be some consequences. The final warning when Zeus arrived at the feast in the form of a dragon. 

She didn't think she could feel more thin and narrow. 

Until Apollon took a puff of her mama's pipe. Stood up and shadowed by the golden hood of a great snake, sang a prophecy about a doubled Maid expecting thunder's heir. He could have meant anyone, but she knew. She was an earth goddess. She knew. She was the receptive earth and Zeus was the rain, and she wanted to fade into a cloud.

While she was quietly dissolving, her mama fell apart. Not literally. Demeter was a goddess. They don't transform into a tree unless they want to. She watched as a nymph covered in glittering gems approached Demeter with a toss of her beautiful hair. As she said something that mama didn't like. As Demeter transformed Minthe into nothing but dust. 

Kore plucked the dust from the floor. It was easy. Dust wanted to go into her hands. To be something else. She had given away her tears and her rage. She knew exactly what to do. She remade the ash into a mint plant with fragrant leaves. She remade Minthe into a plant that might wilt in the heat, whose leaves might burn in a lightning blast, but whose roots would be strong. The roots were what mattered. She gave the herb to Haides and turned to go.

Haides stood there with an herb who used to be his mistress, who had been his responsibility. Who he had failed. 

Because from the moment that Apollon prophesied some new heir for his youngest brother, Haides kept thinking that his Lady of Sorrows must not stay on Olympos a moment more. It thundered in his ears.

Perhaps that was why he failed Minthe. 

Perhaps.

He judged himself. But not so much that he didn't go to his little brother and lean over him on his throne and say, "In return for what Demeter has been taken from me, give me your daughter Kore." The name was hard on his tongue. The wrong shape for who she was. At least he knew her name now. He looked into his youngest brother's heart and saw what he always saw. Turbulent nothing.

He saw his brother's spinning mind turn over the idea, liking it. His little brother thought having sex with Haides was a death sentence. Even with Minthe very visibly alive earlier in the evening. He liked the thought of Kore's death from Haides' desire. The death of any life within her. Because once his brother had an idea in his whirlwind head, nothing could drive it out. 

Zeus said, "We'll have to keep it under wraps." Even now he was spinning schemes that contradicted each other. 

Haides took little to no assurance from Zeus. Instead he went to Demeter's palace. She was not there. So he prepared his great chariot. He went to take what he felt was owed him.

Now as to Kore, she had left with her mama leaning all her weight on her shoulder, the caves over her mind getting deeper and deeper as they walked by the garden. It was still charred and smoking. 

She didn't go back to the dead stone palace. She took Demeter to the stables. Let her slump into sleep on the floor of her chariot. Kore harnessed the winged serpents by herself. She drove the chariot through the dark of night. Her sister moon wasn't out. She drove by the light of the stars. Dead heroes. Her half-brothers and sisters. 

The winged serpents tried to comfort her when she arrived home, but all she felt was the dragon's scales. She unharnessed them. Took Demeter to her bed. Sat up all the rest of the night without sleeping. Thoughts chasing one after another.

Demeter didn't ask how they'd left Olympos. She walked barefoot in her own fields, but nothing grew. Kore looked at her and thought, "She knows." She looked at her and the thought grew like a weed that Demeter had gone through the same thing. Perhaps her shadow whispered that to her. Perhaps she'd always known.

While Demeter, she looked at her daughter with her hollowed out eyes and knew something horrible had happened on Olympos. Something she had failed to prevent. That she had done everything she knew to protect her daughter and still failed. 

Kore thought, "I would help you if you could."

Demeter thought, "I failed you." She retreated into smoke.

Kore turned away. She needed to help herself. She needed to end this story. Start another one. That was how a story as old as time had to go. A twist in the road. A fateful decision. Although, there had been plenty of those so far. She took her mama's adamantine sickle. Her own bronze scythe would not do for what she planned. She dressed in a winding sheet. She dressed to die, because the blade of final harvest would do the trick if she used it. 

Kore was in the grip of blame on blame. Thoughts like gnawing rats at a grainery, they plagued her. She did not want to become her mother.

She went to the river's edge. Contemplated the surface of the water and her own winding sheet. Contemplated becoming a tree. A rotten tree full of dead flowers and choked by mistletoe. Camly and with hardly a thought, she lightly opened up the flesh of her arms with the adamantine blade. Watched as ichor spilled out and where the drops fell grew fleshy flowers of strange beauty. Not deep. She hesitated to do that. Instead, her shadow holding her tight, she reached for those beautiful flowers. 

As she reached, Haides came from the earth in his chariot in a cloud of shadows. This was, to be clear, a kidnapping. 

He pulled her into the chariot and in her confused thoughts, she could only call the dragon's name. 

While Haides, he sped them through the three layers of darkness. He came to the swamp of his hate. He pulled the lady from the chariot and bathed her arms in the Styx until the flesh closed. 

While before them, the river boiled and bubbled. It was painful. Giving birth ever was a painful process.

From where the river Acheron poured into the Styx, the wailing river pushed. The current pushed, an arm wreathed in green serpents reached out of the water. She said, "I am Tisiphone, who brings retribution." She looked around at the river. "Papa. Where is mama?"

From where the Phlegethon burned at the edge of the Styx, the boiling river pushed. The currents pushed. The stone pushed. Until a red serpent wrapped arm reached out of the stone. Her fingernails like talons. Her face was terrible to behold. She said, "My name is Maegera, who holds an unending grudge." She looked around the barren shore. "Papa, where is Mama?"

From the Styx itself, a black serpent wrapped arm emerged from the water. A thin woman with bleeding angry eyes pulled herself out with the help of her sisters. She said, "I am Alecto, whose rage is unceasing." She reached out with grasping hands. "Mama, you are here." 

There on the banks of the river Styx, Haides heard his Lady of Sorrows laugh for the first time. Strange. Jagged. Perfectly in keeping with what was in her heart.

Kore stared at her daughters. She knew they were her daughters, because they came from her. Their fingernails were hard thick dagger points. Their teeth were equally sharp. Their eyes wept blood and burning rage. Growls slipped from their twisted mouths. The wounds of their bodies bubbled with scorpions.

She knew these were her tears. Her screams. Her blood. She looked at their ruddy glares and felt light-headed. "You are my fury." She looked up at the three fold darkness and growled a wordless cry.

Her voice echoed into the dark. It flashed not with lightning. Nothing so bright. Black coils. Gyres spiraling down. They deepened her shadow. Earth goddess as she was, they spread roots. She felt and then she knew that she was in a deep land fit for warped and unruly creatures. 

Alecto said, "Mama, what do you want us to do?"

Kore thought with sudden fierceness that she was never going to tell her fierce daughters to smile. Ever. She was never going to tell her ferocious daughters to be quiet. Ever. She was not going to tell her furious daughters to hide who they were.

She considered the poisonous serpents sliding around her daughters' arms. She said through gritted teeth, "Avenge those who have committed wrongs among the living. Scream. Rage. Grieve." 

Her fierce, ferocious, furious daughters, with fire flickering in their eyes, because what comes of spring time grasses, but summer flames, went out into the world. She almost called them back. She almost said wait, that was the ghost of the girl who had died by the river. That girl was dead. 

"No," said her shadow. "But we were never the girl they told us to be."

She was done being quiet. 

She was done being Kore the girl. She was Persephone, who had died. She was going to bring destruction.

She turned to her kidnapper. Her immovable object. 

The Lord of the Dead looked at her and his eyes were nothing like her father's. They were nothing like her mama's. He said, "You went to kill yourself. Here you are in the land of the dead. But there's a price for being here. Be my queen." This was his idea of wooing. It was better than Zeus', but that was a very low threshold. 

She said some choice profanities. It felt good. It felt very good. But then again, her sorrow, rage, and despair were just then climbing up Mount Olympos. 

They walked into the great hall of Olympos. Zeus dropped his cup. "Who are those hags?"

Athena knew immediately. She very much knew. She'd known when she'd seen how her father behaved when he talked about inviting Kore to Olympos. That was why she'd woven the blanket. She also knew she might have been a trifle too subtle when she wove threads from a certain cloth with a certain old blood into the fabric. She'd protected Kore from one thing, but not another.

Still Athena was a quick thinker. She said, "Father, I know that you are only testing me. Brilliant as you are. Because everything I know comes from your own head." She pointed at them. "These are the last daughters of Ouranos. When the blood from his castrated cock," she said the word precisely, the little crudity carefully positioned to appeal to Zeus, "Fell on the soil, they were born. The Erinyes are the spirit of divine vengeance." 

They were destroying the feast hall. Zeus reached for his thunderbolts, but Athena said, "You're testing me again, Father. You know if you strike them, you'll take a wound seven times as great as anything you give them." She wasn't entirely lying. There was a great deal of rage in those wrathful women.

Since Zeus couldn't admit not to knowing something, he said, "Yes, of course, yes." He shouted at the women. "You're ugly. Not even a one. You're zeroes. Bleeding everywhere ugly."

The Erinyes were very busy killing the Kyklopes very dead and not listening to him. True there were strange things that came of the Kyklopes' blood, but the Furies were strange women and took those things as pets.

All of which very efficiently cleared out Olympos as everyone decided to be somewhere else. Including Zeus, who remembered that his mistress Semele wanted him to visit. 

But that was up on Olympos.

Down in the underworld, Persephone looked at the wide vast plain stretching out from the marshy Styx. 

Haides thought this was a good time to woo. He said, "My lady, if you were to marry me, I would make you queen of this place. I would give you power." He meant she would have power up to a point, but he would have more. He meant she would share everything with him, and he nothing with her. "You would rule all that lives and moves here. Those who try to wrong you would be punished. You would have the power to punish them."

Kore said very absently, "I already have that power." Kore noticed an object on the floor of the chariot. It was Demeter's sickle. She laughed. Not a too high too trilling little girl's laugh. This was rusty as a despoiled hacksaw in a tree branch that is weeping at the loss of a limb. It felt good. It felt like a warped box opening and turning into a tree. Her roots sank deeper into the dark places. Into the deep. 

Haides shivered in the face of her laughter and she recalled something her mama had said many times. She said it now in her own way. "Men are afraid of being the object of women's laughter. Women are afraid of being the object of men's violence." She turned the sickle in her hands. "I am not an object." She turned the blade of final harvest over and over in her hands. "I do not want to marry you."

But then she looked at him again. Her shadow saw into his heart. Her shadow whispered, "This is a god of infinite patience." 

She tried again. "I am pregnant with the child of Zeus." 

"Yes," because he saw it was true. "Marry me and he'll have a father."

She lengthened the handle of the sickle. Scythe from a sickle. She used it as a staff to walk away along the shore of the swamp. She muddied her feet in the earth below the earth. Persephone the furious. She'd given birth to her rage. That didn't mean she wasn't angry. She stripped off her winding sheet. She didn't bother with clothes. She sank down into the mud. She moved naked through the land. Her shadow followed her. Long as a winding sheet. She moved until she came to the place to be still in the fields of asphodel.

She held out her arms and felt the softness of the air. The purity of the quiet. She smiled, because there was no moon. No sun. No stars. She smiled even when Haides came near her in shadow. The panting of his dog's many heads gave him away.

They stood next to each other silently for some time. Their shadows flirted with each other. Soft edges merging. 

Until duty called. He made himself leave. He left his dog with her. She stroked Kerberos' scales and fur. His scales were ridged and shaped like laurel leaves. His fur had two layers of hair. The outer layer was hard and sleek. Bristly if rubbed the wrong way. The underlayer of hair was soft. He panted from all three mouths when she rubbed his belly covered in soft hair. She asked Kerberos, "Does Haides love you?"

Kerberos whined at Haides' name and licked her face from three mouths. A sort of answer. 

While in her home, Demeter was waking up. She'd been asleep all this while. When she woke up, she realized that the blade of final harvest wasn't next to her on her bed. The Sirens told her that her daughter was nowhere in the house.

She followed the trail of withered grass. She came to where her daughter had used the blade and bled precious ichor on the grass. Where fleshy flowers bloomed. Where the earth was disrupted. 

Demeter knew what had happened as if it had happened to her. She knew where her daughter had gone. How could she not? But her heart rejected what she knew. So she went from place to place searching for her.

She knew where she needed to go. She just couldn't bring herself to go there. She couldn't turn to face the truth. That the one brother she trusted not to hurt her daughter had grabbed her. Dragged her into the earth.

While she wandered, the story goes that she performed miracles. It was said that she lived in a palace and granted gifts to princes. 

That was not how it went. She withdrew from the natural world. She went to the bottom. Not of a well, but it may as well have been. She went to Eleusis. She lived on the street with the derelicts. The destitute. Mortals who had no hope left. Who turned to her gift of sweet poppy to dull the edges of the world, which only cut them further still. Who drank mead to drown their fears, which only learned to swim. Who gave way to madness, although the god for such had not yet been born.

This was where winter came from. The world grew cold. Bitter and hard. No seeds sprouted. No flowers bloomed. No animals went into season. 

The hopeless remained without hope.

First Zeus sent Hermes to talk to Demeter. She looked at him dully as he picked his way through the hopeless clinging to dreams. He crouched down next to her and said, "Auntie, there's got to be some sort of deal we can come to. What do you want and I'll get it?" 

"I told Kore to be quiet." She cried and the sap dried within the trees. Beetles made nests in the tree tops, withering them. Weakening them until they died.

Zeus sent Athena to talk some sense into Demeter. Athena crouched down and said, "Please, let me help you up. You're not helping anyone there."

"I told Kore to smile, but not smile too much." Demeter pulled her robe over her face and the fields dried up. Rich soil blew away in the wind. There was nothing to hold it down.

Zeus sent Apollon, who said, "Look, the Lord of Many is boring as fuck, but he's powerful. It's a good deal." 

Demeter pulled her shawl over her head. The grass on the plains turned brittle and caught fire until the air was choked with it. There was no nourishment for the herds in the fields or in the pasture.

Artemis came next. Her hunting dogs swarmed around her. She said, "This is just a bitch of a thing isn't it?" She sat down next to Demeter. "Auntie Demmy, you've got to pull out of this. Nothing will be alive if you don't."

"I failed Kore. I didn't keep her safe." Demeter said this through cracked lips. She was as parched as the land. She rattled like a long dead leaf.

Artemis hauled Demeter to her feet. "Come on. Let's at least clean you up." She took her pipe and turned it into a night moth. "Just because the forests are mine, doesn't mean they can't also be yours. Come on. You want to see Kore again, don't you?"

"Yes." Demeter wanted nothing more. "I want her now. Today. Everything the way it was."

"Not going to happen, but," Artemis sighed, "we can go forward. See what we get. You want to get out of the gutter? You're ready right? Because I don't know if this'll work unless you're ready to make the move." She'd tried many times with Apollon, but he never left Olympos. She waited. Artemis was a hunter. She was patient in her way.

Demeter said softly, "Yes, please."

What happened next wasn't a miracle. What happened next was Demeter went back into the wild places and waited in the cold.

The miracle happened below the earth. 

Her daughters came to find Persephone. Covered in red blood and green sticky ichor. Tisiphone said, "Mama, you won't believe who we just punished."

Alecto danced on her toes. "Guess?" 

Megaera sat down on the edge of the bed, staining it with blood. "We trashed Olympos. We gutted the Kyklopes who threatened you. We…" she moved her head side to side, "wanted to attack the dragon, but he's,"

"A king," said Tisiphone, "and that's a hard person to take vengeance on."

Alecto said, "A coward. He left and used his power on someone less powerful than you."

She looked at the personification of her rage. Persephone said, "Tell me the story of it." 

Kore listened to her children. It was gruesome. Kore found she didn't care. She wasn't a lamb. A fawn. A girl. Or not just. Not merely. 

She was Persephone. 

She got up. Sent her children off to their own ends. Went to sit with the quiet shades. Murmuring shades. Not loud. Not restless. Souls dragged down by as much sorrow as she felt. They'd all paid a cost to get there. It set her to thinking. 

She lined up a row of rocks. It comforted her. Their alignment. Haides came to join her. He stared at the rocks. They were after all his. He helped her lift and shift the lines. Their shadows mingled where their hands did not. The shades who were not root made their way within the lines. Turning. Spinning themselves deeper and deeper until they were gone. Into poplar trees and vines and clouds.

Haides watched them go. He had spent a long time collecting souls. He made a soft place for himself and watched them go. She sat next to him.

Her kidnapper. Her immovable object. Roots deepening, ever deepening, she knew herself finally. No object, but an unstoppable force.

But she knew Haides did not understand when he said, "My Lady, marry me and become my queen."

Kore had spent some time thinking about that. "I'm already a queen of the underworld. I don't need to marry you to do that." To prove her point, she whistled and Kerberos bounded up to her. She scratched his belly and said, "I am not here to teach you how to let go. To teach you not to kidnap someone. It's not my job to carry the urn of your emotions."

It was then that she felt the first of her birth pangs. The normal ones. The ones by which women aren't born from water. But they were too soon. She wasn't due to give birth for several months. She called for her daughters and they came.

She gave birth to a boy in her bed of earth with her Furies in attendance. It wasn't painless. Screaming and bleeding and crying could not be called painless. At the end of it, she pushed out the child that she had been growing. The child that was in a rush to be born. He was so tiny. Too small. She named her milky eyed baby Zagreus, which meant great hunter. She kissed the tiny horns on each side of his head. Nothing more than nubs really. Tried not to think that horned animals were hunted, not hunters. That his eyes were blind to the world, born as he was in darkness.

Haides held out his wide hands. He asked, "Can I hold him?" Persephone looked into his heart and saw where he'd been pierced by arrows. For Erotes do not pierce only for lust. She nodded.

Haides cradled the little child. "Marry me. I will acknowledge him as my son. After all," he looked at her steadily, "we've had three daughters already, my lady."

Persephone looked at him. She didn't speak. Suddenly struck. She didn't feel angry. She wasn't afraid. She simply was. From that place of perfect stillness, she told him the truth. "His love won't have a price. But it will cost you giving your love away."

"I know." Haides pressed a kiss to Zagreus' tiny forehead. Fragile and small for all he was a god. Eager to be born. "I'm ready."

Haides was not even remotely ready. But when Zagreus screamed with hunger or soiled wrappings or from a simple need to feel skin against skin, Haides wanted nothing more than to give his love away. So he did. 

Each time he held the child, he felt the grip of his love. He whispered to Zagreus, "I won't let anyone devour you. I'll protect you." He felt helpless as he said it. He felt the shadow of some future threat, but no prophet, he didn't know the form of it. Still, he said it and handed the child of his heart back to Persephone.

But when he asked if she would be his queen, she replied, "I am not an object." 

He wasn't quite ready to offer something else. Not Haides. So the moment passed.

There they were, when Hermes came with souls. He said, "Kore, great Zeus has decided you've got to come back. Your mom invented winter. It's cold and it's wet and yet nothing grows. I hate to think what it would be like if Hestia weren't there add a little warmth." He held out a hand. "We can conceal the kid if you want. No one needs to be the wiser."

Zagreus let go of her nipple and gave a milky sigh. She burped him on her shoulder. "Why would anyone wish to be less wise?" She wouldn't have said that before. But she had given birth to her fury and her fear. They were standing beside her. 

Haides couldn't very well stand against his little brother. Not in this. But seeing that she was about to leave, he placed the seeds of a pomegranate honey sweet in her hand so she could be his.

Persephone considered the seeds. She thought about it. She thought about her furious daughters. Her gurgling son. She took the pomegranate seeds. After all, this was her kingdom too.

She went with Hermes over the walls and through the three fold darkness.

Nothing stopped them as they travelled through the earth, or river, or sea, or mountain peaks. They came to a stop in a pine forest where the fragrant trees dripped with resin. To the place where her dark-robed mama stood in the new fallen snow. She knew that her mama loved her. Had overturned the seasons of the world to return her to the world. 

Her Mama who thought she was broken. Who thought that she herself was broken, and perhaps she was. A burned tree may still grow. May spread seeds in the fire.

Persephone let some of the pomegranate seeds fall on the ground where they sprouted into trees. She imbued upon each a blessing that any woman who ate six pomegranate seeds bound together in pine pitch might find that her body rejected what unwanted seed was spread in her soil and would bring her moon blood back.

A capricious blessing. Not always effective. But one full of compassion for the hard choices women face.

Now that was not all. When they reached her mama, Hermes, god of liars as he was, told her mama, "Here is your daughter returned to you."

Persephone needed to be blunt. She told her mama her truth and one more. "I will spend half the year in the underworld." 

Persephone cradled her brother-son in her arms. Turned away as her mother suggested giving the child away. Give it away to another god to raise, so she could be Kore again. Just be a girl again. 

As if she was the object of a man's desire.

She wasn't an object. 

Her mama said softly, "I lost myself while you were gone." 

Persephone looked at her mama fondly. "I know, Mama. I know." She set out to show her mama the shape of who she was. Not who her mama imagined her to be. A warped box to be hidden away. All around them flowers bloomed in new ways. But when the time came to make a home, she made her own with space for her child.

This was the first winter. This was the first spring. 


	4. Twice Born Child

Sometime after this in the court of Olympos, Eris would loudly say, "The prophecy of thunder's heir must refer to Zagreus son of... Chthonic Zeus," with a sly look at storm cloud Zeus.

While Melpomene with an equally sly look would disagree, "It must be Semele's unborn child. She has the blood of seven gods in her veins. For what is a mortal, but a child of death and nature."

As Persephone, she did not care for prophecy. She was in her home in the world. She looked down at Zagreus in his cradle and asked, "Why won't you grow?" Her baby blinked at her. "You were in such a rush to be born." 

Zagueus answered her with a wail. Along the farther wall of the garden, there was an explosion of ivy. 

"If you grew, you could tell me what you want," said Persephone. But Zageus just wept. Determined it would seem to remain just as small as he'd been the day he'd been born, while she desperately wanted him to grow faster and faster until he was safe.

He was no Hermes to reveal his godhood by stealing cattle. Although, vines kept growing even if he did not. 

But she was a goddess with joys unrelated to a child. Spring and life to unfurl. So she set a Siren to watching him. Once. Twice, this went well. But on the third time, only to return from her errands to find his cradle empty. To find the siren she'd left watching Zageus asleep in her chair. 

The smell of opium thick in the air. Something black like tar crept around her heart. She didn't want to think that her mother had taken him to get rid of him. She didn't want to think that, but she still did. 

Persephone didn't panic. 

Heart beating faster than fast, she thought, "This is what Mama felt when I disappeared." She gathered her Furies to her. She sent Alecto to bring the news to Haides, sent Megaera off to Eleusis, and went with Tisiphone towards her mother's home in Crete. 

On the way, as she came near Thebes, she came to the field where dragons' teeth had once been sewn to make soldiers. There she found a pregnant woman dying on a bier. Her face, once beautiful, had been horribly burned and one eye was milky from flame. Her breath rattled in her chest, while inside her two hearts beat slowly. 

Tisiphone said, "We must avenge  this woman and her unborn daughter." She laid her hand above the woman's chest. "Semele asked for a boon and was given this by the sky king." 

Persephone longed to continue on towards Crete, but as she met Semele's milky eye, like those of Zagreus, and she knew that she had to take her to Olympos. Where the nectar of the gods might be found and healing and justice. She sent Tisiphone on towards Crete and turned her own steps in the direction she did not wish to go.

Olympos.

While up on Olympos, Zeus called for a feast to celebrate. He lifted a wildly weeping horned baby in his arms. 

When Athena saw him, all she could think was, "No, it's too soon." She wasn't ready. But she was a woman of craft. So she went to Demeter's empty palace and retrieved a blanket with old blood woven into the threads. 

Blood spilled on the day she was born. From the blow that gave her birth from her father's head. When she returned, she found her father was shouting over the crowd while the baby lay wailing on his throne. "Everyone, welcome my son, Zageus, the horned god." Father smiled widely. "His mother is the Maiden. Kore. Just as Apollon prophesied.The Eunuch certainly isn't able to have a child?"

Athena couldn't help but think that things were unraveling very quickly. She couldn't help but think that the child was wailing from the cold. She quickly wrapped the babe up in a blanket, while Ares yelled, "What about my rights?" As always focused on what he thought was his due.

"I am the king. I can do whatever I want, moron," said Father with a wild smile. "My baby boy. The king who will surpass me in every way. This little prince will be the king after." He winked at the crowded room. "A long time from now let me assure you. 

Ares, the rash fool, rushed from the room, most likely to find Hera. 

Athena stood there head spinning. Calculating. Trying to decide what was occuring. At least the child had stopped weeping. At least there was that. Indeed, he seemed fascinated by the weave of the blanket. Touching each thread with wondering fingers. 

Father picked up a thunderbolt and placed it in the child's hands. Father laughed. "Here's a fine toy to play with." 

Athena went very still and said in an undertone, "Father, Is that wise?" Thunderbolts were nothing for a child to play with. She tried to determine what he could be playing at. 

It felt like an eternity that stretched on and on. Finally, Father turned and looked at her as if he didn't know her. His eyes wide and wild as a stormy sky. Then his expression changed. Full of laughter and giddy excitement. She didn't like that look. It never resulted in good fortune. He said, "Athena, watch over my boy and keep him safe. Gotta make sure Hera doesn't do something insane again. Try to kill Kore." He rolled his eyes drolly and several gods laughed. As if any of what was happening was even remotely normal. Athena stood by the throne while her Father left his own celebration.

Eris crowed and pumped a fist in the air. "I was right. It was Kore's brat."

"What now?" asked Melpomene. That broke whatever dam had been on restraint and the room erupted again in conversations. Furious and fast. Athena concentrated on how to get the thunderbolt away from Zagreus. He wailed when she did it. 

Athena took the thunderbolt and removed it to be placed at the far end of the dias. Perhaps not the most respectful place to put it, but it was at least out of the hands of an infant. Then she cast her mind about for what to do next. 

Whatever she would have done next cannot be known for Kronos followed by several Titans bent to enter the great hall of Olympos.

For in the prison of Tartaros, Haides stood by an empty door. "This is how it ends." That was what Haides thought when he saw the doors of prison flung open. Titans from their cells.

That was what he had time to think before Helios appeared in the inner door. 

Helios shook a spear in the air and spat at Haides. "For Phaethon." 

His mother Theia held a spear of her own. "We will retake all of it."

Hadies took a step back into the prison gate. "No. What I have, I keep."

Theia answered by throwing her spear. Haides blocked it with his aegis. He threw the bident and as Hephaestos had once promised, it shattered stone and killed, which was well and good, but now it was embedded in an implacable enemy breeding poisonous creatures. 

In the end, he used what he had used all those years ago. He swung the thigh bone of destruction as he battled waves of wrathful Titans. He whistled for reinforcements and Kerberos came with snapping quick jaws. 

Haides held the gate. Bleeding. Blooming fleshy flowers with poisoned scent and creatures, but he held the gate until the Empousa, Hekatonkheires, and one of his furious daughters arrived to drive the Titans back into their cells. His beast of a father was not among them. Nor any of his uncles.

He counted the prisoners and again. Every moment felt like a moment wasted, but before he could set off for Olympos he must know the situation. He must assume the worst for when he arrived. 

Wearily, Alecto said, "Father, my brother Zagreus is missing. That is why mama sent me to you." 

Haides felt a needle in his heart at that. A choice of what to save. A choice of what to fight for. A choice of what to give up. He turned to Hekate with her torches, and with a sigh thought to himself. "All choices are one." He said, "I know where Zagreus is and who has released the Titans."

While in the throne room above, Athena cursed and drew her sword. She ran towards Kronos, but Krios blocked her way. The Titans were all armed, if Athena was not mistaken, with weapons forged by the Kyklopes. While in the back of the room, she could see Hera urging the Titans on. 

Hyperion attacked bleary Apollon, shouting, "You dare call yourself the sun." The Titan blazed with eye searing glory. Athena didn't have time to help Apollon. Posiden battled Iapetos with a dinner plate. Koios slashed through a flock of Muses with his sword. She didn't have time. She needed to stop the Titans from reaching the thunderbolt on the other side of the dias. 

But she was too late. Krios threw her back, while Kronos thundered lightning on her shield. She felt the power of his blow. Cracking the marble beneath her feet. Lightning flew furiously around the room, shaking the walls. Scorching the air. Until it stopped. Not that she had time for anything, but concentrating on Krios' sword. 

Relief came as Artemis began arrow pricking Titans. A hook of Athena's spear had Krios tumbling back down the stairs. 

Athena turned to Kronos and understood why lightning had stopped. There was blood on Kronos' mouth and lips. His face was smeared with it. She couldn't focus on that. She must focus on the task at hand, which was defending herself from Krios' renewed attack. 

It was to this chaos that Persephone arrived at the great door. She could hear the shrieks. She could see the running gods. She laid Semele down outside the door. She went into the feasting hall with her scythe. 

She saw Kronos. She saw him covered in the blood of her child. She screamed her rage. Her fury. Her fear. He turned to look at her. Monster with her father's eyes. Kronos flung a lightning bolt at her, but Persephone was rage. She was the despair of a mother left with empty arms. She was a chthonic goddess of stygian realms. She devoured his lightning and kept coming. She consumed the monsters that came from the blood he spilled. 

Athena, next to Kronos, slammed her shield into his face. Slashed her blade across his belly. Not good enough. 

Persephone brought down her scythe and harvested the hand that held lightning. Sending his hand and the thunderbolt clattering to the stairs. Where his blood pumped onto the floor, venomous serpents sprouted. She ate those too. 

Athena held her sword to Kronos' throat, she said, "Yield." 

Persephone didn't have time. She had no time. She rushed to the throne. "No. No. No." What was left of her child on the throne was nothing whole. Not a body. Limbs. Yet, in the center of all that, a beating heart. Persephone picked up what remained gently. Carefully. The parts fit in one palm, while the other hand held the scythe of harvest. She blew on the heart gently. "Stay with me." 

Kronos laughed. "Sons replace Fathers. Unless Fathers replace sons." He picked up a familiar little blanket with his remaining hand. Wiped at the blood smeared on his face. Then with a cruel smile, he placed the cloth into his mouth tearing it with his teeth.

On the far side of the room, Hera fell to the ground screaming. Bleeding golden ichor from her abdomen.

Persphone didn't care about Hera. She wept over the still beating heart. Watering it with her tears. Whispering over and over. "Live."

Haides came into the room holding a thigh bone. Followed by three burly hundred armed Hekatonkheires armed with rocks. Too late to save their child.

Eris laughed. "Uncle H, Zeus is going to be so mad about how you failed to keep the Titans.... Holy shit, dad!" 

Persephone turned to see the dragon, Zeus, slumped on the floor where Hera had fallen. Golden ichor from the same wound. 

"You took him. Murderer! Rapist!" Persephone shrieked and lunged forward with her scythe. 

Haides caught her with a tendril of shadows. He said, "Lady of Sorrows, you're still holding his heart." He asked, "Is it still beating in your hand?"

Persephone remembered. She and Haides bowed their heads over it. Their combined breath keeping the heart alive by virtue of not allowing it to die. 

Athena spared a look to see Haides and Persephone still as statues. Their cupped hands and joined focus on the tiny heart in Persephone's hands. Athena did what Haides could not in that moment. She ordered the Hekatonkheires to bind the Titans and take them back to their cells in Tartaros. She asked the Hekatonkheires, "What is the situation in Tartaros? Where five escape, a hundred more may also find their way out."

Zeus said weakly, "Oh, I'm sure Hera didn't manage that. I stopped her after she freed my father. You all heard my father tell you that Hera freed him didn't you. How she begged him to give her a place as his queen. How she offered to free all the Titans. But I was too smart for her. Caught her before she could. And now I've been injured defending all of you."

Poseidon righted his carving knife turned trident on the broken marble. "I have difficulty believing that Hera would ever free," he glared at Kronos being dragged by his feet by a Hekatonkheires, "the prick who ate us."

"Are you calling me a liar," blustered Zeus. "I don't believe it. After I saved you from the Titans that my mad cow of a wife freed. You make me question if you're worthy of the kingdom I gave you. After you failed to prevent this tragedy. While I sit here wounded in my own blood." 

Athena didn't have the option for bluster. She could only go forward. She approached her father and got down on one knee. "Father, I'm sorry to have failed you." 

Father was already healing. Sitting up further. He was after all king of the gods. There was power in that. 

Athena considered the mud on the sides of Father's shoes. They were covered in the red-black clay that could only be found in Tartaros, which could be explained by capturing Hera there. Were Hera still in the room rather than quite obviously Father sitting in the place where she'd been. Athena said loudly, "Father, I failed you. If you want to take back my patrimony, then I won't protest. But please, let me prove myself to you. Let me find out how Hera got the weapons to the Titans. How she was able to free them."

It made her heart sink, but it wasn't unexpected when Father cleared his throat. "No. No. Of course, I won't for such a small, well, not small. Terrible failure. Huge. Worst failure ever. Doesn't matter how it happened. Just that it did." 

In that moment, Hestia came back into the hall. She returned with Semele held easily in her arms. Upon that woman's breast, a half dead infant breathed weakly. 

Hestia said, "Persephone, press what remains into the living child. Do it quick."

Spring girl that she was, Persephone pressed the heart into the child and let go. The hard part was letting go. 

Hestia blew a puff of life. Fire. That stuff of immortality that was hers to give. But then, she was the eldest of the Olympians. The little grey infant twitched. Still too small to survive outside of a mother for long and more chimeric than he-she'd been a moment before.

"It's just going to die," said Zeus. "All that and for what. It'll die." 

Tisiphone said, "Semele deserves justice."

Alecto said, "Mama deserves justice."

Megaera said, "The sky-father deserves to know how it feels."

They fell on Zeus, and lifted away his chiton. It did appear to Athena's admittedly unpracticed eye that the favorite part of her father's anatomy was not up to producing any children just then. Then then, it had been a toss up as to which head the old blood in the blanket would have damaged if cut.

With taloned fingers, the Furies did furious work, and gentle as a dove slid the infant into Zeus' groin and closed it with a spark. Tisiphone said, "There may be some damage when the child is born." 

Zeus clawed at his closed wound. "Get it out. Get it out." 

Athena stopped his hands. "You're only going to hurt yourself, Father. Don't worry," she smiled that perfect smile that she'd perfected over centuries. "I'll care for you during your confinement. You and the heir to the throne of Olympos."

Persephone said contemplatively, "No woman has ever suffered as he will suffer when he gives birth to that child."

"This is insane," said Zeus. "You're all insane."

"Perhaps," said Persephone. "And I'm not leaving my child alone up here inside him." She glared around her at the great hall of Olympos. She turned the couch where she'd been forced to sit beside Zeus into ash and thorn. The roof flew away in a murder of crows. She melted the golden panels on the walls to Zeus' glory into marigolds. The marble tiles became white swans. The hearth became doves, leaving only the fire quickly cradled in Hestia's arms. Bit by bit, she transformed Olympos until all that remained were the ancient golden walls built to withstand a war with the Titans.

Persephone meant destroyer. 

Zeus shouted. "What are you doing, you bitch?"

Haides shut Zeus' mouth with darkness. "The door will be open when you are ready, Lady of Righteous Destruction. I will watch over our child until then."

Persephone paused. Turned. "You didn't call me my Lady. You didn't call me yours." 

"No," said Haides, leaving with his burden. "You are a queen in your own right."

Persephone considered for a time, but there was work yet on the earth. Time soon enough to go to where the child would be born. 

As it was, it was some months later that Dionysos was born from what everyone had decided to refer to as Zeus' thigh. Well, not exactly born. The flesh refused to part until Persephone delicately harvested her child. Delicately because of the child. The bone inside was weak from nourishing Dionysos. 

The bone and certain other regions that Zeus had always rather prized, but there was always a price to making life. It wasn't justice. Zeus left the underworld in a frenzy, which made sense given the child.

She named the child Dionysos, which meant twice born. God of birth and death. Fertility and fermentation. Wine and madness. Boy. Girl. They could be whatever they wanted to be. Changeable. Heaven and earth's child. 

Persephone took the baby gladly in her arms. Accepted Haides' gift. A new cradle of myrrh wood. A pine cone rattle from Demeter, who stepped gingerly into the realm of the dead. Vines were already growing from the wood. While Semele watched, pale shade, Persephone tapped the infant's cheek and gravely listened to Dionysus laugh. Turned to Haides in his dark corner of the room, and beckoned him closer the better to listen to it too. The better for their shadows to slide and mingle as they held a twice born child.


End file.
